Four Poems by Susan Cossette

 

Surgery of the Soul

 

 

The sun’s red lips kiss 

through the lace curtains 

while I sip lukewarm tea. 

 

Sparrows flit is slow motion 

to and from the feeder, 

suet clumps sticky  

on the bedroom window. 

 

Last year, you cut my feelings from me. 

 

I no longer recall the straps 

wrapped around my wrists and ankles, 

or that final crunch when you thrust 

the icepick into my left eye. 

 

Steel butter knife twisting  

into my unruly brain-- 

flattening it into a coiled ginkgo leaf, 

that now adorns the lily of the valley china  

I use for Sunday brunch. 

 

It took less than 10 minutes. 

 

After, you asked how many pennies 

were in the jar on the cold steel counter. 

You shook it, and the sound of copper  

rattling against icy glass was deafening. 

 

I guessed 4,344, and you proclaimed success. 

 

Today, I cannot remember how to set a table 

or where my own butter knife goes. 

 

You may have scraped my brain clean, 

but you did not touch my soul.

 

 

Scenes from My Existential Crisis

 

 

This morning the world turned black and white, 

the crimson sunrise grey. 

I know that something isn’t right. 

 

Yesterday the world was bright, 

my soul could sing and play. 

This morning the world turned black and white. 

 

The fog chokes my brain, an evil sprite, 

I try but cannot pray. 

I know that something isn’t right. 

 

This bird of night cannot take flight, 

She’s tangled in the fray. 

This morning the world turned black and white. 

 

I am an orchid under ultraviolet light 

but cannot break away. 

I know that something isn’t right. 

 

Thirty years wed, no end in sight, 

interred in cold New England clay 

This morning the world turned black and white. 

I know that something isn’t right.

 

 

Memorial Day

 

 

The dusty drapery comes off. 

 

She brushes cobwebs from the window screens, 

wipes the sea-salt from the glass. 

 

It was time. 

 

Next, the exterminator arrives to annihilate  

ant swarms in the white kitchen, 

reborn from a winter of hibernation. 

 

A syringe of bait under the radiator attracts 

them, and they take the poison 

back to the nest. 

 

It is time. 

 

Each Spring she had resurrected 

into a new iteration of herself. 

 

Always placid, orderly, compliant. 

 

No one knew. 

She had waited for her rescue, 

tapping on the copper pipes, 

passing messages in Morse code. 

 

At dusk, the iron pot steams, 

curling her hair into wild tendrils. 

Without feeling, she thrusts lobsters 

into the churning water. 

 

Rustling claws, then silence.

 

 

Dream of the Second Coming

 

 

The kettle screams, 

the steam curls into an image of His face 

that hangs like a phantom over the counter 

and dissipates when I reach to touch its cheek. 

The water is ready for tea. 

 

Every voice message in your inbox is His. 

 

In a language I haven’t studied since college 

He tells me to return overdue library books, 

pay the credit card bills in full, 

bring a loaf of bread and cabernet  

to Sunday supper at His house. 

 

I can’t understand the rest. 

 

Overnight, his image is everywhere. 

Sketched in red marker  

on the bathroom wall of the VFW bathroom, 

on the back of the bus I follow  

down Lowry Avenue every morning, 

on tee-shirts sold out of old vans at football tailgates, 

tattooed on my boyfriend’s forehead. 

 

He preaches on afternoon talk shows 

and works at the Super Wal-Mart, 

doling out judgment from behind the deli counter. 

 

I take a number and wait for forgiveness  

with the other blonde wives. 

 

Unafraid, I exchange recipes and gossip.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Poems by Jonathan Butcher

 

The Landscape They Requested

Hollow rocks with unnatural holes
frame this pathway. A dampness
hangs, which seems pleasant
at first to those who crave such
sights, but who then backtrack,
once they remain choked 
and soaking in a flood of their
own making. 

The stepping stones embedded 
in this river, the distance between 
each one too vast for safety, leaving
those craving direction stranded,
until we throw a lifeline, which 
they reject, despite the weight
of consequence, under which
their spines never seem to break. 

And the hillsides with hidden slough,
trap them ankle deep, they seem
happy in the sheer discontentment;
four-leaf clovers and rusted horse
shoes entangled in their jaws
and broken teeth, again content
to never consider a better option,
as this would of course, be far too
much of a risk.

 

 

Same Routine

 

When waste replaces flags,
spun from fabrics too decomposed
to fly happily in broken winds,
perched on rooftops of still
wet concrete, that will eventually
dry, ever marked by their withered
handprints.

When the garbled excuses narrate 
the reason they are flown at half-mast,
indicative of their predecessors, 
who brushed their hair, straightened
their ties, and stapled their tongues 
to their lips.

Each landmark stained 
by the same symbols a deflection
from any distraction away from
that single repeated message,
which spreads and burns up 
this field of dried, yellow fauna,
only extinguished once our blood
turns to water.

 

 

Gradual Pace

The days off now seem
a little bloated, but without
the indulgence or indolence,
just the action of applying 
time correctly, no backs
are broken at this pace.

Any drinks remain ice
cold in glasses, the escalators
in galleries always seem to work,
never a trip or a broken fall
in these cafes; no upturned
pavements soiled with a hint 
of freshly spilt blood.

Tranquil maybe an exaggeration,  
but each hour now unfolds 
without the drag of barbwire 
over reluctant bones, the splinters 
of which remain an irritant 
for days to come and are pulled
from wounds that never seem to heal.

Twilight closes our evenings
rather than dawn, a stretch 
of sleep which remains undisturbed,
the walls and doors remain 
at a comfortable distance;
enforced enclosure now a thing
of the past, these open doors
now a welcome gift.

 

Jonathan Butcher has had poems appear in various print and online publications such as  The Morning Star, Mad Swirl, Drunk Monkeys, Unlikely Stories Mark V, The Abyss, and others. His fourth chapbook, Turpentine, was published by Alien Buddha Press.

He is also the editor of online poetry journal Fixator Press.